Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service.
Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)